https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5482547
Although I no longer work for the BBC and have already received my bonuses for the filing and granting (after I left the BBC) of this patent I have a personal curiosity as the core inventive step was (I believe) mine although it was greatly extended and improved by others with greater domain knowledge in MPEG encoding. As far as I know it was a novel idea and wasn't obvious in advance to experienced video encoding engineers.
The original idea was to treat encoding losses as errors/defects that can be fixed or patched by additional data distributed separately. This was extended to arbitrary enhancements and changes and potential implementations, consequences and techniques.
I believe that there was a real non-obvious inventive step in considering encoder losses as patchable bugs. Given that idea alone a (suboptimal) implementation is relatively easy to create but was not obvious if the task being discussed is using the early 2000's Internet to deliver better video quality than broadcast (SD) TV could.
I am not aware of any current usage of the ideas in this patent or what licenses the BBC may or may not have granted.
[Comments and responses here.]